Dark Views

In this article, I’m trying to collect the steps to find out the reason when Eclipse is suddenly slow:

1. Java GC. To find out if that’s the culprit, go to Window -> Preferences -> General and enable “Show heap status”. You will get a little gauge at the bottom of the Window. If the gauge is almost full, then you probably have too little memory.
   Solutions:
   a) Give Eclipse more memory
   b) Close some projects
   c) Deinstall or disable unnecessary plugins
2. Check the Eclipse Error Log. Maybe there is a problem under the hood.
3. Some plugin is acting up. Enable Eclipse’s own logging (see below) and watch the console.
   Some plugins have their own console (Groovy, Maven). In the Console View, click the arrow of the “Open Console” button to get a list. The Stacktrace Console – a useful tool to examine stacktraces from some external source – is also hidden there.
4. The metadata got corrupted. Clean it.

Enable Eclipse’s Console Logging

When you start a Java application inside of Eclipse, you can see the output in a console view. You can do the same for Eclipse itself.

Open eclipse.ini and add these lines right before -vm (or -vmargs, if there is no -vm line):

-console
-consoleLog
-debug

See “Debug Mode“, “Eclipse runtime options” and “FAQ How do I use the platform debug tracing facility”

On Windows, make sure Eclipse is started with java.exe instead of javaw.exe.

Eclipse will log errors and trace information to the console window. Check the output.

Enable Tracing

Many Eclipse plugins offer a range of trace options. You can see them if you open the plugin JARs. Look for a file called “.options”.

If you copy some of those into a file “.options” in the same folder as “eclipse.ini”, you can able various logging options.

Here is an example what the file could look like:

org.eclipse.ui/debug=true 
org.eclipse.ui/trace/graphics=true

Maven m2e Plugin

If the m2e plugin causes problems:

1. Look into the Maven console.
2. Try Maven from the command line to see whether it’s a problem with the project in general or with m2e.
3. Tweak the logging options of m2e by editing

   WORKSPACE_ROOT/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.m2e.logback.configuration

m2e FAQ